afikra Conversations: Shawkat Toorawa

Join the afikra team as the interview Shawkat Toorawa for the afikra Conversations series.

Professor Shawkat M. Toorawa is a Professor of Arabic at Yale, he received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught Arabic at Duke University, medieval French literature and Indian Ocean studies at the University of Mauritius, and Arabic and other literatures at Cornell University. His scholarly interests include: classical and medieval Arabic literature, especially the literary and writerly culture of Abbasid Baghdad; the Qur’an, in particular hapaxes, rhyme-words, and translation; the Waqwaq Tree and islands; Indian Ocean studies, particularly Creole literatures of Mauritius and the Mascarenes; modern poetry; translation, and SF film and literature. His books include a translation of Adonis’s A Time Between Ashes and Roses: Poems (2004), Arabic Literary Culture: 500–925, co-edited with Michael Cooperson, and more. Toorawa is a Director of the School of Abbasid Studies, on the editorial boards of the Journal of Abbasid Studies, the Journal of Arabic Literature, the Journal of Qur’anic Studies, and Middle Eastern Literatures, and an executive editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.